Speaker
Description
When neutrinos interact via coherent elastic scattering with a nucleus, a tiny recoil is created. To be able to detect this recoil, special requirements have to be met. Detectors with a low enough noise threshold are needed and only recent developments make it possible to access the energy range where a detection is possible. Moreover, a large neutrino flux at energies within the regime of the coherent interaction is demanded with the prime candidates being neutrinos from nuclear power plants or pion decay at rest sources. As these sources are located at shallow depth, special attention has to be paid at the suppression of cosmogenic induced backgrounds.
The talk will focus on the high-purity point contact Germanium detectors employed by the CONUS experiment located at the nuclear power plant of Brokdorf, Germany, at 17m distance from the reactor core. The special circumstances at the nuclear power plant deviate far from laboratory conditions which leads to particular demands at the detector technology. Moreover, especially reactor correlated backgrounds have to be carefully characterized and an elaborated shield is needed to suppress them. In the talk it will be presented how these challenges are met for the CONUS experiment.
